Hey guys, thanks for the cool distro! This is exactly what I was in search of..

Now that the formalities are over -- HELP!!

I have 2 1GB USB pen drives that I'm trying to get a VIA EPIA 5000 board to boot from.

Yes, it's restricted to USB-FDD or USB-ZIP, so I took the USB-ZIP path. I booted my laptop into DSL from the CD, ran the USB-ZIP installation and verified that the pens were both flashed correctly.

Oddly enough, one pen registers as /dev/sda the other as /dev/uba - well, that's just the start of the differences. The one that registers as /dev/sda doesn't even try to boot on the EPIA board. The machine acts like it's not even there.

The other pen, the one that registers as /dev/uba - it attempts to boot from (light comes on, flashes etc), but immediatly returns with "BOOT ERROR" in the POST screen, no Syslinux() blah messages at all. It's like it wants to boot, but can't - and with no error codes to work with, I'm getting frustramicatified.

I read through the post about drive geometry and tried a few different C/H/S settings to try to make it happy - but in the end I've failed..

Personally I don't think it is possible to change the geometry of a 1 GB or larger pendrive to look like a ZIP drive. But who knows? YMMV Betcha it would work on a small pendrive.
Did you see the posting of the link into the Wiki on geometry?
Did you see the posting regarding booting from USBHDD by changing the order in the BIOS on some M/B?